There's A Gender Gap In The Global Renewable Energy Workforce

Concerns about environmental sustainability and fossil fuel insecurity have convinced many countries to transition to solar, hydro, bioenergy, wind and other renewables. Since producing and distributing renewables is more labour-intensive than producing and distributing fossil fuels, this shift is creating new employment opportunities and also addressing energy poverty in remote and under-served communities.

In OECD countries, the share of female employees in renewables has been estimated at about 20 per cent. Data from Canada, US, Spain, Germany and Italy indicate a general trend of women being employed mostly in non-technical occupations in renewables -- in sales, followed by administrative positions and finally engineers and technicians. In absolute numbers, the largest sources of renewable energy employment for women in industrialized countries are solar photovoltaic, solar heating and cooling, wind power, biomass and biofuels.

The underrepresentation of women in this sector is part of a bigger problem of the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. There is an obvious economic benefit for women who choose to pursue these paths. While wage inequality also exists in STEM jobs, it is smaller. Women in STEM jobs earn 33 per cent more than those in non-STEM occupations. The gender wage gap in STEM jobs is roughly 14 per cent. For non-STEM jobs, it is 21 per cent.

Unlike North America and Europe, where women remain a minority in engineering programs, comparatively large numbers of middle-class women in some emerging economies -- India and China, for example -- study engineering. Although women continue to experience employment discrimination in various forms in such countries, recruitment, especially for entry-level positions, is not a challenge. In China, 40 per cent of engineers are women. In India, 37 per cent of electronics engineers are women. The corresponding figures for civil, computer, electrical and mechanical engineering are 20 per cent, 18 per cent, 16 per cent and 10 per cent respectively.

In the 1980s, 58 per cent of engineers in the USSR were women, but a well-established tradition of state-enforced gender diversity disintegrated in the 1990s and 2000s with the collapse of the USSR and its industrial model. In 1998, women accounted for 43.3 per cent of engineers in Russia; in 2002, only 40.9 per cent. And the numbers have continued to decline further. The Baltic nations (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) that were formerly part of the USSR, but joined the European Union earlier in the 1990s, revealed similar patterns of comparably high but declining rates of participation by women in engineering and technology fields.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) reports that in Estonia, for example, female professional and technical workers still outnumber men two to one -- 68 per cent compared to 32 per cent. Estonia offers significant tuition incentives to draw high-school graduates into fields such as engineering and continues to be identified by the WEF as the country with the highest per-capita number of female engineers, even as the numbers of women joining the field have declined over the decades. Although I am not advocating a return to Soviet-style central planning, it is important to emphasize that state initiatives aimed at improving representation and removing barriers for career advancement for women do work, and they can benefit the renewable energy sector in industrialized, emerging and developing economies.

Broadly speaking, the global energy workforce represents a vertically and horizontally gender-stratified labour market, with women concentrated in the lowest-paid positions, closest to the most menial and tedious components and furthest from the creative design of technology and the authority of management or policymaking. However, there are both qualitative and quantitative differences in women's employment in renewables in different contexts. Much of the expansion of renewables in the Global South has occurred because large numbers of rural, urban poor and remote communities either have no access to the grid, or unreliable access to electricity. A large volume of employment has been generated for both women and men in these contexts because organizations serving such communities (the initiatives of Solar Sister in various African countries, Barefoot College in India, Char Montaz in Bangladesh are good examples) have actively sought to use renewable energies technologies to also secure and improve livelihoods.

Such off-grid, mini-grid and stand-alone renewable energy initiatives have offered women a large volume of employment (albeit often insecure and poorly compensated) as well as opportunities to participate in decision-making. These initiatives are deployed at the local level where women are more likely to be involved in the procurement, design, installation, operation, maintenance and consumption of energy. Decision-making within bigger energy utility systems in both the Global North and South are, by contrast, made by higher-level professional staff within the spheres of generation, transmission and distribution where women are almost always severely underrepresented.

There is tremendous additional potential to create livelihoods for women in the renewable energy sector. However, women can gain optimal traction from renewable energy initiatives only within the context of wider socially progressive policies and more transformative shifts in societal attitudes about gender roles. This is as true for developing countries and emerging economies as it is for industrialized nations. Restructuring paid employment in innovative ways -- through, for example, the creation of more part-time jobs and arrangements like work-sharing -- while expanding social protection and delinking it from employment status, have been suggested in some industrialized countries as a way to accomplish economic security, environmental protection and gender equity. However, without more transformative social changes in gender relations, such strategies may reinforce rather than challenge existing gender inequities both in paid employment and in unpaid domestic labour.

The growth of the renewable energy sector should benefit both women and men but we must be proactive about enabling women to establish a stronger equity stake to compensate for historical and contemporary economic injustices and unequal outcomes. This will require more concrete and proactive actions and policies. Simply creating opportunities for training and employment in new fields and suggesting that women are not unwelcome in them is obviously not enough.

Bipasha Baruah is the Canada Research Chair in Global Women's Issues at Western University, and an associate professor in the Department of Women's Studies and Feminist Research.

The views expressed in this blog are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the positions of CCIC or its members.

Follow HuffPost Canada Blogs on Facebook

ALSO ON HUFFPOST:

Close



Fun STEM Activities For Your Kids

of





Sneak in a lesson about gravity while creating beautiful art with pendulum painting. Suspend a broomstick in between two chairs and hang a plastic cup with some string in between. Put some paint in the cup, then poke a hole in the bottom. Set the cup to swinging to get some lovely designs. (Then you can talk about why the pendulum keeps swinging back and forth, gradually creating smaller and smaller circles.)
Get the details: Hand Made Kids Art

You may know the recipe for homemade slime, but have you ever made magnetic slime? This incredibly cool experiment involves a bit of parental help and supervision, but it's well worth it!
Get the details: Frugal Fun For Boys

Whip up a little kitchen chemistry to teach your kids about colour changes and chemical reactions. Red cabbage juice turns blue when mixed with a base (baking soda) and red when combined with an acid (vinegar). Combine both to get bubbles!
Get the details: One Time Through

The maker movement has done a lot to get people of all ages interested in DIY technology. The MaKey MaKey kit helps kids take everyday objects and turn them into keyboards! Think playing piano with a banana or playing a videogame with Play-Doh. For a demonstration of what a MaKey MaKey kit can do, check this out.
Get the details: MaKey MaKey

This one's called "$7 and a Screwdriver," because Leah at Socks & Shoes Not Required spent $7 on an old VCR at a thrift store. She explained to her kids how it worked, then gave them a screwdriver and let them go to town. Older kids could even try to put it back together. Brilliant!
Get the details: Socks & Shoes Not Required

Wanna check out something cool? This neat experiment involves piping drops of water (carefully) onto coins. Your kids will be amazed that the water doesn't spill over the side! It's a lesson in surface tension, and your child can measure the amount of drops each type of coin can handle until it overflows.
Get the details: The Science Kiddo

LEGO and STEM go hand-in-hand, and you can use your child's favourite multi-coloured building toys to teach many science, math and engineering concepts. Here, you can tackle density with some oil, water and a brick. (More ideas on the site below.)
Get the details: Science Sparks

Anyone with a child and a smartphone knows that kids love taking photos. Send your school age children on a scavenger hunt to photograph items in nature, like flowers, seeds, birds, insects or tree bark. Great for an outdoor birthday party!
Get the details: Betsy's Photography

If you glue popsicles together in a particular way, they will pop apart when you drop them. This lesson in tension is a fun one, and you can even set up the "bombs" next to each other for a chain reaction (a la the domino effect).
Get the details: Frugal Fun For Boys

Forget boring old regular Bingo. Teach your child about fractions in a fun way with this Fractions Bingo game. She rolls the dice to figure out what fraction she's looking for, then fills it in once she finds it. First to get five in a row wins!
Get the details: School Time Snippets

Kids don't learn about simple machines until grade school, but you can introduce the important concept of levers at an early age with this fun and colourful project. Your child can investigate which lever sends the cube flying the furthest.
Get the details: Munchkins & Moms

Your child will learn about kinetics, the study of forces acting on mechanisms, while creating some little funny pals to play with. Turning the wooden dowel makes the googly heads spin, as you can see here.
Get the details: Left Brain Craft Brain

Get your preschooler interested in number recognition and counting by utilizing the landscape of Dr. Seuss favourite, The Lorax. Older kids can work on adding and subtraction.
Get the details: Inspiration Laboratories

If you REALLY want to bring the outdoors in, why not grow mushrooms with your children? This mom of quadruplets taught her four little ones a new x-word by growing xylophagous fungi on a log in their house (in this case shiitake and oyster mushrooms). The kids cared for the mushrooms by misting them each day until finally, mom made them into a casserole.
Get the details: Capri + 3

Ever heard of ichnology? It's the study of the traces of organismal behaviour, like burrows or footprints. Introduce your child to this fascinating study with some air dry clay and plastic animal figurines. Check the website for more ideas involving paint (to make animal footprints on paper).
Get the details: Suzy Homeschooler

A simple mixture of oil, water and food colouring creates a colourful light show in a jar. It also teaches kids about density. (ICYDK, the food colouring is denser than the oil, so it sinks through the oil layer and starts to dissolve in the water).
Get the details: I Can Teach My Child

Even preschoolers can get in on the action with this cute apple-picking counting game. Kids pick up "mini-apples" with child tweezers and place enough on each corresponding number.
Get the details: Fun-a-day!

Magna Tiles are awesome building toys. But you can also get kids excited about multiplication with these colourful, versatile squares. Here, this child is demonstrating 10 x 2.
Get the details: And Next Comes L

Your little ones probably love to look at the sky at night. Bring that magic into the daytime by letting them try their hand at creating each of the planets. A great introduction to astronomy for even the youngest kids!
Get the details: A Little Pinch of Perfect

Set out containers of varying sizes and shapes, then have your scientists-in-training guess whether they think a full scoop of coloured rice will fit inside or overflow. You can explore volume with liquids as well.
Get the details: Little Bins For Little Hands

Explore "pirate science" by freezing small bits of treasure in a baking soda, Jell-O and water solution. Your kids can "dig" for treasure by using vinegar to excavate the goods.
Get the details: Fun-A-Day!